Since January, small businesses across Michigan have filled close to 10,000 jobs, according to the Michigan’s Small Business Jobs Insight project, designed to tally and report the growing number of small business jobs being filled in regions and industries across the state. The project is a cooperative effort of the Small Business Association of Michigan (SBAM), Issue Media Group and other partners.
“I believe that these thousands of small business jobs highlight how small business owners are responding to the incentives created in 2012 by business tax reform and improvements in the Michigan regulatory climate,” says SBAM President and CEO Rob Fowler. “All job growth is positive, but jobs filled at small businesses are especially beneficial because they are more sustainable, they represent from-the-ground-up economic recovery and they support community prosperity across the state.”
The positive numbers reported at MichiganJobsInsight.com reflect other SBAM research from its semi-annual Barometer survey. The June report found that 22 percent of small business owners said they had increased their number of employees in the previous six months. And 26 percent said they planned to hire more employees in the next six months.
MichiganJobsInsight.com is not a scientific count of every job filled in the small business community. “If anything, these totals under-report the employment growth story going on across Michigan,” Fowler says. “I’m impressed by the breadth of the growth across so many industry sectors, from hospitality to IT to retail.”
More about MichiganJobsInsight.com:
The key elements of MichiganJobsInsight.com include:
- a ticker that displays jobs reported by growing small businesses in the current month;
- a pie chart that shows the percentage per Michigan region of the total jobs reported per month;
- total jobs reported for the year to-date;
- the top ten industries for small business growth; and
- links to individual stories of regional small business job growth.
In addition to the MichiganJobsInsight.com website, MichiganJobsInsight can be found on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.